Further observations on the name of Tovste and similarly-named
towns in Ukraine (edited)

I am fairly certain that in the Soviet period (1944-1991), the various
towns in Ukraine called Tovste, or some variant of Tovste, were known
as Tolstoy(e), or a variant of it. In a modern road atlas of Ukraine (Ukraina:
atlas avtomobil'nikh shlyakhiv, 1: 500,000 - published in 2004), only
the last of the five "other unrelated Tovste's" mentioned on
your web page - the one near Donetsk - is called Tolstoy. (In fact, it
is the only town in Ukraine now known as Tolstoy, according to this atlas;
the other four are referred to as either Tovste or Tovsta.)

Donetsk is an area that leans to Russia politically and where, I think,
Russian is spoken, so it is not surprising that they have kept the Russian
name. I surmise that all these towns were called Tolstoy (or similar)
during the Soviet period, and most of them have reverted to being called
Tovste/Tovsta, or similar, since 1991. Of course, in the case of the eastern
Galician towns, they also earlier had Polish names (Tluste) as well as
other variants (Touste, Toyst(e), etc).

Interestingly, the above-mentioned road atlas lists a number of other
towns containing tovste + another word or particle:

Obviously, there is no confusion here, not even for the places in Ternopil
oblast, with the other Tovste's, but it is interesting how tovste and
variants crop up in place names.

Finally, I found on a web site that the small town [approx. 49Â°08'N 25Â°00'E]
presently called Vysoke (and previously called by the Russian name Vysokoye
-- both adjectives meaning 'tall', 'high') was, at one time, called Tovstobaby
or Tlustobaby or Toustobaby. It is a few kilometres to the east of Galych,
and north-east of Ivano Frankivsk. [See, for instance, among sites that
can be found on Google: http://www.personal.ceu.hu/students/97/Roman_Zakharii/pidhajtsi.htm.